Media & Communication CUE Courses
Media and Communication majors will have a single CUE option, CUE 401: Ways of Seeing. This course gives all Media and Communication seniors the opportunity to have a shared, integrative experience that blends media analysis and media making. While the current “pathways” approach has offered a variety of options to students, these options did not always offer the shared, integrative experience a CUE was intended to offer graduating seniors. In the interests of offering a coherent, comprehensive yet also flexible to the varied interests of our students, the Media and Communication faculty decided to shift to a single course which will be taught by many of our faculty. Note: for students who have been accepted into the COM Honors Program, 472: Media and Comm Honors Seminar will satisfy the CUE requirement.
Class of 2024+ CUE:
COM 401 - CUE: Ways of Seeing
1 course unit
Ways of Seeing returns to and builds on themes and competencies developed in the other core courses: source credibility in Media & Society, the media-maker’s “location” in Documentary Research, and the implications for scholarly knowledge of leading methodologies in Media Theory and Methods. Ways of Seeing picks up this epistemological thread—“Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (Kenneth Burke)—with formats, modes, standards, and mediums in particular focus. Ways of Seeing is designed to challenge the binary between theory and practice, through the idea of media analysis through media making. Bi-weekly units are organized around a mode of “seeing” (in a deliberately capacious sense of that word) like “text” or “image.” For each unit, provocative and often theoretical readings are paired with limited media-making training appropriate to that mode. Note: for students who have been accepted into the COM Honors Program, 472: Media and Comm Honors Seminar will satisfy the CUE requirement.
Prerequisite(s): COM 301 Media Theory & Methods
